“Introduction to Scala” Workshop — 5 half-days online for Latam

During the past 5 days (June 11–15) I was giving “Introduction to Scala” workshop to a group of 10 people from different countries in South America (aka Latam).

The workshop was held online from 6pm to 10pm Poland time due to time zone difference (the difference was -5 hours if I’m not mistaken).

We used Skype for Business as a communication tool with the Conversation panel for most of our discussions. The participants could also have used their microphones, but that happened only at the beginning of every session. It worked quite fine, but the main challenge was that I could not have seen people’s faces and know ahead how we’re doing. With that unavailable, I had to speak much often than usual during my workshops and keep asking questions about people’s progress in the Conversation panel. That proved workable, but I did miss the direct communication a lot.

The idea of the workshop was to teach people how to write Scala applications so they could eventually write Apache Spark applications. Since most Spark applications are pretty “flat” at their use of Scala features (I usually say that Spark applications are Scala one-liners), the agenda was targeted at Scala tools and techniques rather than the advanced features of Scala.